Q & A with SmallBox's e-mail wizard, Nick Klooz!

Anyone involved in marketing in the digital age has probably wondered how to make email marketing more relevant and exciting for recipients. When done correctly, email marketing can excite and engage potential customers. Without purpose or strategy, it can come across as flat or annoying.

A few days ago, I had a chat with our wizard of all things email-related, Nick Klooz, to talk about his recent work for Floors To Your Home. He revealed some interesting ideas and tactics that helped take FTYH's email campaigns to a new level!

Hi Nick, I heard the Floors to Your Home email campaign was pretty interesting. Could you tell us what you did for them?

We did a full email automation campaign, where we started by mapping out all of FTYH customer touch points. This helps reveal customers who have shown interest in a certain floor or multiple floors but haven't committed to buying yet.

How did you map that?

Dan led the mapping, and Elizabeth and I we were also there with the Floors to Your Home team. We had a productive whiteboard session, in which we went through a few different touchpoints. We started with a "lock-in your price" feature, so that created one email track. Then we mapped out email tracks for when someone orders a sample, for when someone has an abandoned cart, etc. Basically we put ourselves in the customer's shoes while we planned out each automated track: "What kind of email would I want to receive at this point in the buying process? What would be helpful and relevant, what would get me excited about my floor(s), etc?"

After you mapped out those individual tracks what happened next?

As we were planning out each email we picked how many days later the follow-up emails should be sent. For example: how many days after the confirmation email should we send them the email about the room designer? The final decision for that one was that two days is the ideal amount of time to wait.

What was the actual production process like?

I designed each of the individual emails in Photoshop. I didn't do any actual template designing or coding, but they were created with a template in mind (e.g. the header, the footer, the overall style) to keep a consistent look throughout. After that, we handed off the photoshop designs to the FTYH developers for implementation.

What kind of design decisions were made based on the particular touch points you mapped out?

We began that part of the process during the brainstorming session. When someone orders a sample of flooring, the first thing they get is a confirmation email. So they were designed to match the confirmation designs Neil made previously. And then we planned the next email to be sent before their sample arrived, and I designed it in a way that would get the customer excited about the sample. In that email, we wanted to show them a picture of their floor in the Floors to Your Home room designer, so it was designed around the idea of showing them what their floor would look like before they actually got the sample.

How many emails did you design for this project?

There were about 12 emails total, although a couple were just plain text, so probably about 10 designs total. And of those 10, a couple were very similar so getting a lot of designs done quickly was not too difficult this time around.

Thanks, Nick! Anything else you would like to tell us about this project?

This was the first time I had done something like this, and it was fun learning this new method to engage with audiences through email. Another facet of this project was designing a sheet of paper that would be placed inside the samples box. Basically, FTYH had all these separate sheets of paper that they would include in the box with the floor samples. The idea behind my design was to take all of that information and combine it into one visually-attractive, easy-to-read and easy-to-digest document.